It Has Begun

Gifts have been bought, parties have been planned, Pandora radio is playing Andy Williams’ finest: Internet, it’s the holidays up in this bitch.

First picture with Santa: PROCURED.* And now that it’s done, I can freely confess that it kind of skeeves me out to see Sadie sitting on some weird old dude’s lap. GET YOUR HAND OFF HER LEG, YOU PERV!

I hope you had a fan-fucking-tastic Thanksgiving holiday, Internet, because we sure did. Three cheers for ignoring deep-seated family dysfunction!

HIP HIP I HATE YOU!

Yes, I was very thankful that we were all willing and able to put aside our differences for the sake of stuffing ourselves silly and spending time with the shorties – one of whom turned a very messy and sugar-infused ONE YEAR OLD.

Abby: 1, Cupcake: 0

Highlights of the weekend included watching Sadie enjoy the shit out of some Thanksgiving dinner (pumpkin pie took a little getting used to, as the first bite was immediately squirted out all over my shirt), and lots of lounging around in pajamas.

Well, not so much “lounging” as “chasing while trying not to spill my coffee.”

The only truly sucky part of the weekend was the random teething episode that seemed to crop up on Friday evening into Saturday. I can see another bottom tooth poking through (and strongly suspect something on the top left as well), and these pearly whites are apparently a whole hell of a lot more painful than the first round. We have a continual runny nose, OCEANS of drool, and the occasional, completely random unleashing of a sound that resembles something between a parrot being murdered and the Wilhelm scream.

Nearly giving the cat a heart attack is tiring.

Sadie also demonstrated some highly clingy behavior towards me this weekend – probably a result of feeling kind of crummy and being in unfamiliar surroundings – and while this warms my heart to no end, it also means that most of my photos from the trip look like this:

Thank goodness I had my shoes at the ready. In other news, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THESE SHOES? Are they supposed to make this woman look like she has hooves?

We have already started making some of our holiday purchases, and every year I have to admit I have a fleeting moment in which I get pretty fucking Scroogey about it. When you step back and think about it, it’s so fucking stupid to go spending hundreds of dollars on gifts people probably won’t even use or enjoy. Bah. BAH, I say! But then I get all caught up in the music and the lights and the cookies and the decorations, and there’s always that ONE perfect gift that’s sure to elicit shrieks of joy from the lucky recipient…

…this year it will likely be a certain little girl I know who FLIPS HER SHIT when she watches YouTube clips of Grover…

…and when I start thinking of the holidays in those terms, I get all soft and emotional and nostalgic. And then I watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and my transformation to a big ol’ pile of sappy seasonal cheer is complete.

I mean COME ON.

This year I am mostly just struck by how damn quickly the past 12 months have flown by. I can still remember decorating the tree last year clear as day (I had to take a nap halfway through, O GLORIOUS PREGNANCY FATIGUE!), and I specifically remember stopping to think how we’d have an 8-month-old when Christmas of ’09 rolled around.

An 8-month-old with REALLY SHARP TEETH, to be exact.

So I’m jumping into this holiday season with both feet and attempting to make it as memorable as possible. Uh, that’s memorable in the good way, not memorable in the “having a nervous breakdown trying to figure out how to pay the gas bill AND buy all of Sadie’s daycare teachers nice gifts so that they will not let my precious child simmer in her own excrement for too long” kind of way.

Would it be gauche to spell out “Please keep my baby alive” in sugar cookies?

*Sorry for the shitty photo quality – it’s an iPhone photo of the original print, because our scanner is in the basement and also probably a centipede condominium by now.

Oh yes. The high-pitched squeal. I remember it well, with both kids. It was so unbelievably loud and in such a different frequency, that I thought it was going to ignite a shit storm of dogs and cats running past our house.

I just recently discovered that our local mega-outdoor store (home of everything in the world to do with hunting, fishing, boating, etc.etc.etc.) offers free Santa pictures. The backdrop? Camo. BUT OF COURSE.

Needless to say, I know where MY son’s first Santa picture is going to be. And a very merry woodchuck Christmas to you!

Teething is basically like being Wolverine in that blades come shooting out of your flesh. Except the blades come out in your mouth instead of out of your hands, and they are bones instead of titanium, and they come out much more slowly, and only once instead of every time you need them, and also you don’t always heal immediately from every injury you get. Also you’re not huge and muscled, and you have never hosted the Oscars. Plus there’s the whole thing about the government and how babies aren’t top secret projects developed by the Pentagon.

I thought that might be a photo of you on Santa’s lap! And “Hip hip I hate you” almost killed me! And so would those shoes. What the what? And that picture of Sadie is adorable. Do you also feel like she’s thinking, “Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more”…or is that just me?

Did you know that there is a whole movie about the Christmas Shoes? It stars Rob Lowe! And Kimberly Williams (I always think of her as the girl from Father of the Bride).http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330152/
If you can handle it, the music video for the song basically plays out the entire movie: